Increasingly, what was once a TV-only media world is now a world in which consumers receive video content not only through traditional TV channels but also via the Internet across a wide variety of connected devices.

For advertisers, this complicates the landscape.

With that in mind, we commissioned IDC, a leading provider of global market intelligence, to research how to choose an ad technology that’s most efficient in driving brand results across TV and digital video.

The resulting paper examines the shifting advertising market and evaluates the need for technology solutions built to address the specific constraints of premium video. It first discusses the three categorical challenges advertisers face:

How to maintain audience reach to address consumers who spend time on video platforms rather than linear TV

How to leverage more precise, data-driven targeting across all screens, including traditional TV advertising

How to address both the TV population and the video population in an integrated, consistent fashion to achieve greater effectiveness

IDC goes on to compare the differences between programmatic advertising technology solutions built specifically for video versus those built for display.

“Not all programmatic platforms are able to address the needs of video and TV advertisers equally well,” said Karsten Weide, Program VP, Media and Entertainment, IDC Research. “There are platforms, built upon real-time bidding (RTB)–based buying and optimization mathematics, that originated in the abundant world of display advertising and then were extended to serve video and TV advertising. The fundamental shortcoming of these platforms is that they are based on the RTB protocol, which is not suited to deal with constrained, premium-priced TV and video inventory and the subsequent need for futures buying.”

Weide continues, “Video specialists on the other hand are platforms that have been designed from the outset to serve the constrained world of TV and video advertising. These systems are cognizant of the fact that the newly converging video-and-TV world calls for a different set of protocols that take into account the way TV is usually sold and therefore may serve brand advertisers better.”

The piece goes on to discuss the concept of Upfront buying—how linear TV advertising has traditionally been purchased—and forecasting—the ability to use data for guaranteeing ads are shown to a certain audience. IDC argues the need for a reservation-based system to guarantee the delivery of ads against constrained, premium video content.

“Marketers must be able to rely on the fact that advertising inventory will be available to them when they launch a new product or a long-planned marketing campaign,” said Weide.

IDC also notes the need to achieve true brand-metrics, such as awareness, consideration and offline sales. They argue that early programmatic technology was built to focus on proxy metrics like impression count or click-through-rate, instead of brand results that affect the bottom-line of a business.

“RTB-based platforms with their display advertising roots, were designed to drive a different set of metrics. Early programmatic display advertisers' main objectives were to run campaigns with huge reach numbers at a low cost. On the other hand, because video specialists were created with the eventual convergence of video with TV in mind, they were designed to drive metrics important to TV-centric brand advertisers,” continued Weide.

Additionally, after careful evaluation, IDC provides two key competitive advantages to working with Videology:

Videology allows for upfront forecasting and purchasing of video and TV ad inventory. Conversely, platforms that exclusively use the RTB protocol to source inventory have no forecasting capabilities, thus no inventory or delivery guarantees.

Videology has a unique integration with Nielsen, allowing impression-level matching of data across both TV and digital video channels